


Of Black and White

by panjianlien



Category: Master Li and Number Ten Ox - Barry Hughart
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-05
Updated: 2011-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:45:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panjianlien/pseuds/panjianlien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speaking raven is one thing, but mastering the art of qing gung is another.  Ox does both.  And then some.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Black and White

We were three days out from Harbin on the northwest road. My farm-boy eye could see the hills as they would be months from now, covered in sweet undulant green, but now all there was to see was white where the snow was, which was almost everywhere, and dust-colored rock everywhere else. We trudged through the bleak gray light, leaving but a single set of footprints behind us, for Master Li was much too small and much too old to contend with snow so deep. From his perch on my shoulders, gnarled old feet in their fur-lined boots tucked neatly under my arms, the greatest mind in all China scanned the horizon and tugged on my ears.

This was not, I wish to make clear, by way of steering me. It is true that I am called Number Ten Ox, but I am hardly so balky and difficult to direct that one must yank my ears to get me to go where you want me to. Besides, it wasn’t snowing and even with the snow, the road to Bukui was reasonably clear. So long as Master Li and I could spot the next in the series of roadside shrines that commemorated the travails of past travelers going north, I knew exactly which way to point my great big feet. No, he tugged my ears for a different, but still pragmatic reason. He was trying to teach me the art of qing gung, the skill of moving the vital force through the body in such a way that one becomes lighter and lighter. Masters of the art, Master Li claimed, could walk on the rims of thin woven-grass baskets without crushing them, and caper like goats across large sheets of paper held aloft by their disciples. Snow was no obstacle to one who could walk on it without breaking its delicate crust. Or at least it wouldn’t be if they could manage it.

“You’ve got to think elevating thoughts, Ox,” Li Kao chided, pinching my ears between the thumb and the palm of his mittened hands. I tried, as he pulled up on my ears, to feel myself rising through the snow, imagined how it would feel to dance across the surface of the knee-deep whiteness instead of trudging laboriously through it.  
All I could actually feel was the weight of my boots, which seemed to grow heavier every time I had to lift them. “I just don’t think it’s going to work,” I sighed.

“I must be pulling the wrong way. I wish I could recall exactly how old Master Rao said he did it. He really had the touch. Had one of his students walking across fine sand without even leaving footprints on the very first day. I never could figure out why every assassin and burglar in the land wasn’t kowtowing at Rao’s door begging to learn it. And all he did was pull up—” and here Master Li demonstrated again— “in a particular way on their ears.”

On we went, Li Kao experimenting with different grips and amounts of pressure as he yanked and tugged and pulled my ears. I wondered if they would begin to stretch, whether I would look like an old bull elephant by the time we got where we were going. At least I wasn’t cold, and neither was Master Li. Walking through snow that deep is enough work to keep anyone warm, and sitting on top of me, Master Li had noted the day before, was not unlike riding on one of the great earthen ovens they used in the little huts and hovels that sporadically dotted this empty northern land.

We rounded a bend and I felt Li Kao stiffen. “What is it?” I asked. “Do you see the tree?”

His answer was cautious, but by his posture he was riveted, eyes locked like a falcon’s on what appeared to be a tall black smudge in a field of white, halfway up a hill. As I squinted against the snow-glare, I could just make out a black shape descending, swooping in fast and, it appeared, landing in the tree. If it wasn’t the fusang, well, we could worry about that when we got to it. I took off at a canter, and would’ve run flat out if the snow had let me. Master Li let out a little yelp, holding on tight to my ears in earnest now, and we bounded toward the hillside, or at any rate as near to bounding as I could manage.

I was panting like an old dog by the time we neared the tree, struggling with snow, with what had proven to be a much steeper slope than I’d thought, and with the bouncing of an excited Master Li upon my shoulders. “Ox! Ox! Get some of the jerky out of your pouch!” he cried, pointing to the glossy black bird that sat preening in the upper branches of the naked, wind-scoured tree.

Peeling off sweat-soaked mittens I fumbled with the thong that held the pouch shut. Extracting a chunk of dark, well-dried yak meat glistening with fat, I passed it up to Master Li, who waved it aloft.

“Noble Grandfather Yangwu!” he shouted, “We bow to your eminence! We bring you fine fat meat of the she-yak, may it find favor in your eyes!”

The bird’s head swiveled in a slow, measured way until it locked eyes with Master Li’s. “Haaaaaw! Haaaaaw! Haaaaaw!” it laughed, its thick ebony bill opening wide with each ejaculation. The derision in the bird’s voice was complete, and the slight tilt to its head as it eyed Li Kao suggested that the bird knew a few things Master Li did not. I flushed with shame, afraid that we had ruined our chances before we’d even really begun. With a loud whuff the bird pushed off from its perch, wide black wings effortlessly scooping air. It was all I could do not to duck instinctively as it swooped toward Master Li and snatched the jerky from his outstretched hand.  
Noiselessly the bird returned to its perch and began to eat the meat. I marveled at how easily its beak sliced through it; Master Li had to soak his in his wine for a bit first before his venerable teeth could chew it and even I had to cut mine into small chunks with a knife. Master Li stifled a laugh, the little inward giggle that said he was up to something.

“Noble Grandfather Yangwu!” he began again, “we have come to you for help. We would have asked the bower-birds, but they were much too vain. We would have asked the magpies, but they were much too greedy. We would have asked the eagles, but they keep themselves aloof from the affairs of men, and say that if we are stupid enough to have problems we cannot solve ourselves, then we are welcome to them. We asked ourselves who the noblest of the birds was, who the smartest and the boldest and the ones who see everything and remember it all, and we could do nothing else but to seek you, oh wise Black Bird. You have carried the sun on your back, you have eaten of the grasses of immortality diri and chunsheng, you have been a fleet commander in the Bridge of Birds, ridden in Mother Xihe’s Carriage and eluded the arrows of the Celestial Archer. Only you can have flown high enough and far enough to see what must be seen, to know what must be known, to have the jewels of wisdom whose merest fragments are as entire worlds compared to our puny flightless thoughts. We bow down before you, of all the birds, the only feathered creature who can help us in our quest.”

With that, Master Li slid down my back and landed up to his thighs in the snow. Immediately he fell to his knees, snow up to his shoulders. Beside him, I followed suit, as he let himself fall face-first into the deep and downy white. I had never kowtowed in snow before. I swiftly learned that snow, pressed against a face hot and flushed from slogging through it, felt almost like fire.

When I rose again to my knees, Master Li was laughing and so was the big black bird. Holding his sides and hooting with glee, Master Li gestured with his hand at the bird, whose raucous “Haaaaaw”s were so vigorous it fell, awkwardly flapping, off its high perch. It scrabbled to catch another long angular branch on the way down and ruffled its feathers into composure, making a little grunty sound. “Li Kao, you old bastard,” it rasped, “I thought I was going to hurt myself laughing by the end.”

“Ha ha! I thought that bit about the jewels of wisdom might get you!” Master Li sang out, striding forward into the snow. “Get out that flask, then, Number Ten Ox. Every raven-prince I’ve ever met likes to get drunk now and then. And why don’t you get out the rest of that jerky, and the salted eggs?”

And this was how we ended up standing in a snowfield on a hill at the base of a bare, black-trunked tree, having a picnic with a raven-prince. The air seemed warmer and the sun seemed kinder as Master Li and the raven-prince chatted amiably about this and that, mutual acquaintances mostly. Li Kao occasionally tipped a bit more kaoliang into the thin-walled and dented brass bowl that we’d bought way back when in Chengdu, and the raven-prince occasionally stabbed another salted duck egg with his powerful beak, breaking it into chunks that he picked up greedily from the crusted top of the snow.

An hour and all eleven of our preserved eggs later, Master Li and the raven-prince had finally come around to talking business. “If you had ever tried, you could’ve been such a sensible man, Li Kao, even though you never were terribly bright. But now you’ve become a genuine old fool, running all over China on your crazy errands. It must just be that the two teaspoonsful of pigshit you ever had for brains have finally run out your ears. The things you get yourself into would be madness enough for a man a quarter your age…”

“Ah, but I am old, you foul-mouthed bird, and at this point a little bagatelle like wandering a hundred miles through the snow to be insulted by the likes of you is barely a quarter of the madness I require. Besides, why change my ways at this stage in life? And if I didn’t go running all over China on crazy errands, however would I face Lady Yang again?”

Given the numerous and spectacularly obstacular layers of bodyguards, ladies-in-waiting, and household servants that we’d had to negotiate the last time we needed to get a message to Lady Yang—the memory of the evening I spent distracting the flabby-necked, frog-lipped Headmistress of the Concubines’ Hall still made me shudder— I wasn’t precisely convinced that we were ever going to see the great lady’s actual face ever again. I try to be aware, however, of when to keep my big mouth shut.

The raven-prince sighed. “The thing is, great-grandfather Yangwu is never going to buy it that you, of all people, are on a mission of mercy. I believe that you’re telling the truth, for all that you’re a cantankerous antiquated lush with rotten tofu for brains and no more scruples than a she-weasel in heat. But great-grandfather doesn’t like your kind. You’ve run a fair few scams in your time, you know.”

Master Li feigned shock. “Why, Prince, I am wounded to the very quick! Scams, you say? Certainly not! I may, upon occasion, have encouraged the suspension of disbelief in those more endowed with credulity than sense. But surely you recognize that this is virtually a public service. How else are they to learn a healthy skepticism about the world?”

“Haaaaaw! Haaaaw! But you know, there are still a bunch of powerful individuals out there who haven’t forgotten about those stinking ‘phoenix eggs.’ Or the time that most poxy immortal Li Babai descended from Heaven with his thousand oozing purple boils and claimed he required another bath’s worth of hundred-year whiskey to cure his condition for another thousand years! And as I recall Li Babai offered everyone who donated whiskey to the cause a priceless vial of mei jiu made from the plums that grow—”right next to the peaches,” you swore—in the gardens of the Queen Mother of the West…”

Master Li shook his head peevishly. “Some people are just so ungrateful. They did each get a jar of plum wine, after all.”

“Dosed liberally with extract of Thunderballs,” I chimed in, having hallucinated for a solid week after doing the dirty work of grinding all the mushrooms to powder that Master Li converted into a clear, thick, pretty amber liquid.

“Be fair, Ox. You know as well as I that every story that came our way after that said that the drinkers were completely sure that they’d been spiritually transformed by the wallop. You’d expect nothing less than a few days of visions after eating fruit from Xi Wangmu’s garden, after all. And thus by cheating them I actually improved them, because I bestowed upon them the greatest of all virtues…”

“…Which is a sturdy and incorruptible reverence for Heaven!” I finished, with feeling.

The raven-prince laughed until he coughed, then laughed some more while he drained the liquor from the bottom of the brass bowl. “And that, Li Kao, is why Lord Yangwu wouldn’t trust you in his court any further than you could fly.”

Master Li grumbled into his flask. “This is the problem with having a reputation for being good at what you do, Ox. Never let it happen to you. Mediocrity is so much safer.”

I doubted I would have much trouble with that. I had seen a great deal in my time with Master Li, heard many astonishing things and met unusual and remarkable people, not least raven-princes. But of all the marvels I’d witnessed, the most remarkable of them all was Master Li. Someone who knew a tenth of what Master Li had forgotten over his many years, and I doubted he had forgotten much, would still know fifty times more than any but the most senior scholars at Hanlin Forest of Culture Academy. Some one who had met a tenth of the people Master Li had variously fought, swindled, assisted, saved from horrible fates, traveled with, or simply spent a pleasant evening drinking with in his many adventures would still be so well-connected he could instantly go to work for the Emperor. If I occasionally felt like a cow-pat on a silken carpet around Master Li, well, as a proud son of the fine farming village of Ku Fu, I am far more comfortable with cow-pats than silken carpets. I smiled and nodded and turned my attention to sharpening my belt-knife, letting Master Li continue his bickering.

After a few moments, though, I became aware that I was being closely observed. Lightly thumbing the knife’s edge to check its keenness, I looked up just enough to realize that I was smack in the crosshairs of four keen eyes that should’ve been a lot less able to focus, given what they’d had to drink. I crooked an eyebrow.

“You have to admit, he’s the perfect candidate,” Li Kao ventured.

“You have to admit, he’s the only one you’ve got,” quoth the raven.

“You must note his humble bearing."

“You must note his rhino-like size."

“You must appreciate his strength and stamina.”

“You must appreciate his thick, piglike head.”

“You must concede his absolute lack of guile.”

“You must concede his egg-like ignorance.”

“Ah, but Prince Kanpei, ignorance can be cured,” Li Kao cried, and the raven-prince laughed out loud. Master Li clapped his hands with delight. From the look on his face, it was clear he had won some sort of bet. “Ox, how would you feel about learning to speak Raven?”

I looked at Master Li with what I am afraid was a thoroughly stupid expression, mouth hanging open and everything. But it made the raven-prince laugh all over again, and that, it seemed, was enough to seal the deal. If I could learn to speak enough Raven to manage an audience with Lord Yangmu, Prince Kanpei agreed, he would take me to see him.

And that was how I ended up spending three weeks holed up with Master Li in an abandoned herder’s hut in the next valley, taking daily lessons in rasping, shrieking, squawking, and barking from the great-grandson of Lord Yangmu. My throat felt raw and my head swam with noises that only very gradually began to be things that made any sense. Every few days I would take my lessons on the road, my princely tutor riding on my shoulder while I walked along the valley to the tiny village at the hot springs, practicing vocabulary on the way down the valley to haggle for whatever bits of food and drink the villagers might be willing to part with, and being drilled in ritual insults on the way back up. Raven language, it seemed, was about six parts insults to four parts anything else. Even when one was speaking to one’s superiors, it was considered poor form if you didn’t at least tell them they were stupid, ugly, and had all the personal charm of a cart-flattened turd. No wonder Master Li liked it. For me, trained from birth to be scrupulously deferent to my superiors, which when you are a poor peasant is almost everyone, it took a bit of getting used to.

“Drink up, Ox,” Master Li said one evening as he pushed a bowl full of strong-smelling herbal tea across the rough wooden table. He had been out gathering bits of bark and lichen and dried plants he found at the edges of frozen creek banks that day while the raven-prince drilled me in the 39 ways to call someone a congenital idiot, and now assorted bits of forest floated around in the dark broth before me.

I took a cautious sip. “What’s this for?”

Li Kao had begun to chop onions for supper, and he did not look up. “Good for the throat. Heals the membranes. You have a big day tomorrow. Drink up.”

“You mean…?”

“Prince Kanpei says it’s time. He also says you’re a very quick study, but you didn’t hear that from me. There’d be no end of scandal if anyone found out he was paying compliments.”

I took a few swallows of the slightly bitter brew. It didn’t taste very nice, but it did feel good on the tortured tissues of my throat as it went down. In my head, I began to run through my checklist of all the things I would need to do before we all decamped for the next leg of our journey. At the top of the list was making sure our boots and leggings and coats and mittens were ready to face whatever the northern winter was going to throw at us. I wasn’t so worried about my own, having worn them enough recently to know that they were all right, but I hadn’t looked after Master Li’s in weeks. I grabbed his snow-suit from the peg on the wall and began going over it, seam by seam.

“What are you doing, Ox?”

“You’ve got a hole in your leggings, here at the crotch. I’m going to stitch it up.”

“Sit down and drink your tea,” Master Li chided. “I’ll do it while you’re gone.”

“You’ll… oh.” I slumped a little, though I tried not to. “But I thought...”

“If we want Lord Yangmu’s favor, I had better not,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t mind making a nuisance of myself with human royalty, but only an idiot shows genuine disrespect to a raven. The prince has been pretty clear that I wouldn’t be welcome at court. So I’ll wait here. Just a little old man and his pipe and a lifetime of good deeds to look back on, the soft smile of benevolent wisdom on his dear old lips…”

I sputtered, then laughed out loud at Master Li’s mock-pious face.

“Plus, I’ve got half a dozen jugs of that wine from the village smith. It’ll take the varnish off a lacquered lohan but it gets the job done. And you never know what’ll come up. I’m sure I’ll find something to do.”

I didn’t in the slightest doubt Master Li’s ability to keep himself occupied. Still, I didn’t like the idea of going alone, and I said so. Master Li was the one who knew all the details, whose brain held the secrets, whose years of living had given him the tools to deal with nearly anyone. He had been the one who had taken the oath for Madame Yang, promising her that he would reunite her with her sister. He had been the one who had laughed like a mountain brook as he accepted the ruthless Cai Shimin’s proposal that they use Cai’s dice, and still gambled successfully for a peek at the slave-trader’s books. It had been Master Li, not I, whose slyness and cunning had gotten us both into and out of the great and awful prison at Zhengzhau. There he had persuaded the necromancer—a man whose terrifying reputation had made Black Tortoise a watchword for cruelty and evil magic even as far as my own little village of Ku Fu—to part with the tiny key that he claimed unlocked the secret chamber where he stored the alive-but-dead bodies of beautiful young virgins including Madame Yang’s poor sister, bought as a half-starved slave and then sent off to permanent sleep. Black Tortoise claimed he still planned to drain the girls’ yin, someday, once he escaped, to make himself immortal. Master Li could achieve what he wanted, even with the likes of him. And that was just the beginning. Had it been left to me, we would still be in Beijing, mooning around outside the walls of the palace near the concubines’ palace, wondering idly how many palace guards we could take out before they carted us off to be tortured or, more likely, just killed us outright as a waste of their time.

“Nonsense, Ox. You’ll be fine. You’re not heading into the tiger’s mouth, you’re just being presented at court. And it’s not exactly the Duke of Chin’s. Raven-royalty is, well, they’re ravens. They like to laugh and bicker and eat and drink and tell dirty jokes. Ravens don’t do pomp and circumstance. So long as you can make them laugh a few times, you’ll be just fine. And since they think all humans are ridiculous, which of course we are, making them laugh is child’s play.”

“But what if I lose the key?”

“You won’t.”

“But…”

“Either Yangmu will know what door it belongs to or he won’t, and if he doesn’t, he’ll ask the Parliament, and one of them will definitely know. With the reigning ravens of all China in one place, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they’d be able to tell you exactly who’s getting pickpocketed and who’s losing at dice back at One-Eyed Wong’s right this minute. Ravens see everything. And they talk.”

I couldn’t very well argue with that. There was nothing for it but to do the best I could. By the time dawn broke, I had eaten a little, slept a little, and worried a lot, mostly staring into the darkness while Master Li snored. The raven-prince arrived with the light, as usual, and as Master Li stuffed a few little extras into my bag, I put on my leggings and boots. Finally Master Li approached me, holding the little white key in one hand and a slim steel chain in the other. The chain was a wonderful thing, as fine as a wire but stronger, with a clasp at one end that connected through the last loop on the other end with a tiny, sharp snick. The key was cool and flat against my skin, laying just below the notch of my collarbone. With my quilted jacket on, its buttons done up all the way to the top, no one needed to know it was there, and that suited me just fine. I had no clue how long we’d be traveling before we got to the legendary fusang, the magical mulberry tree in which Lord Yangmu, the three-legged black bird-god, made his home. I had no idea what kinds of people—or creatures, for in these wild hills some of the creatures were also people—we would meet. I wanted to arouse as little interest as possible. I was just a poor servant, as I had decided to tell anyone who asked, stuck with the unenviable job of crossing the snows on an errand for his demanding master. It was true enough.

The raven-prince perched on the edge of the hut’s roof as I said my good-byes. I was stalling, of course, and all of us knew it. Finally I stepped down off the doorsill and took a deep breath.

From behind me, there was a sudden tug on my ears. I turned around, face to wrinkled old face with a winking Master Li. “Remember, Ox. Think elevating thoughts.”

And so it was that I set off through the snow with tingling ears and more of a grin than I would’ve imagined possible. Prince Kanpei alternated between flying ahead to show me the path and riding on my shoulder, where he regaled me with jokes so dirty I suspect they might have made even Master Li blush. It was in the middle of one such story, on the second day of our trip, that I realized we were heading directly into a snowstorm. From the top of one rise I could see that the clouds on the horizon were thick and dirty-looking, low and full. I couldn’t quite make out the heavy curtain of snow that I knew they had to be dragging across the land, but I could sense its presence, and see that it would be meeting us soon.

“I think we ought to look for shelter,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

“Nah. Almost there.” the raven-prince said from his perch on my shoulder, twitching a wing dismissively and returning to a joke about a randy rooster, 150 hens, a disapproving farmer, and a flock of vultures.

I thought about pressing the issue, but if we were truly almost there, perhaps we would reach the fusang before the storm reached us. I didn’t want to seem whiny, or argumentative, or anything else that might risk offending Prince Kanpei. Insults were beloved of raven royals, but actual insolence was not. Besides, it seemed likely that the raven-prince knew where he was going.

Twenty minutes later I was no longer so sanguine. The snow-wall had met us, and it was not gentle. One moment I could see it before me, and the next I was in it. The snow was thick and wet and seemed to fill every available inch of air, piling on my head, shoulders, and eyebrows almost instantly. Sounds that had been sharp, like the raven-prince’s voice, were soft around the edges, and the combination of snow and a sinister slow pressing wind made an eerie unfocused hiss in the air.

“Oh, snakeshit.” Prince Kanpei shook snow off himself and into my ear as he dug his talons harder into my shoulder. “Can’t see a damn thing in this, can you? No, of course you can’t, what am I thinking? You bald monkeys can’t see an elephant’s asshole when it’s about to deposit a half-ton of dung on your heads, you poor half-blind bastards. Still, even I can’t see worth a damn in a storm like this. Shit, shit, shit.”

The raven-prince pushed off from my shoulder, his glossy blackness disappearing almost immediately into the thick heavy white. “Hey, wait!” I shouted, then shouted it again in Raven, but if he heard me he gave no sign. I walked a few more steps, then slowed, unsure of what to do. I didn’t know what lay ahead of me, or even which direction I was headed, any more. The closest thing to a landmark was my own footprints behind me, and those were filling rapidly. We had been walking downhill across a fairly open meadow, but in the blizzard I had no way of knowing whether I was about to walk into one of the periodic boulders that decorated the hillsides, or perhaps perilously close to pitching face-first into a streambed. At the thought of a broken leg or even a sprained ankle in this world of impenetrable icy whiteness, I felt my stomach clench.

For a moment or two I stood stock still, letting the snow fall on me, trying to peer through the opaque scrim of it for any speck of black, any sign of the prince. The snow on the top of my head melted and sent diabolical little rivulets of cold down the back of my neck and into my straining eyes. I shivered hard, a deep, full-bodied bristling, and shook myself like a dog to send the snow and meltwater flying. Standing still was no good. I would only freeze to death, drip by chilly drip. And while I recalled Master Li once telling me that freezing to death was not a bad way to go—apparently you get sleepy first, and you sort of drift off to sleep and never wake up again—somehow it did not strike me as a particularly good option. I hoped I hadn’t been abandoned. But I also didn’t know if Prince Kanpei would come back for me, or if he would be able to find me if he did. The only things I did know for sure were first, that if I kept moving I probably wouldn’t freeze to death, and second, that eventually the storm would end, and if I were still warm and breathing when that happened I could figure out how to find my way back to Master Li.

Alone in a gray-and-white world, cold and silent but for the eerie soft noise of the storm, I began to shuffle. It seemed the safest thing to do. A few inches at a time, feeling the pressure of the mounting snow against my shins and knees, I pushed through the thickening blanket on what I hoped was the same heading I’d been on before. It felt silly at first, and stupid, moving as carefully and cautiously as Master Li with a violent hangover. Eventually I fell into a rhythm, shhhh shhhh shhh, the comforting rustle soothing me as I moved slowly on through the blizzard.

I felt Prince Kanpei’s return almost before I heard it. The blizzard was so thick, and it muffled everything so well, that I seemed to hear the firm flap of wings and feel the sharpness of claws landing on my head at the exact same moment.

“You again, you faithless bastard!” I yelped in delight. It was the most enthusiastic and emphatic Raven-ese greeting I had mastered, and I meant every skraaaaark and haaaarrr of it. A small trickle of blood steamed down my scalp from where the raven-prince’s talon dug a bit deep. I did not care.

“Pick up your big fat feet, you lazy mule!” he shrieked by way of reply, tangling his own feet thoroughly into my hair. “I was right, the fusang is just over that way a bit. But we’re never going to get there if you keep on walking like you’re ninety!”

By this I took it that he was delighted to have found me again and, moreover, that somehow I had actually managed to keep going in the correct direction. Surging with hope, I quickened my step, managing something that was almost, but not quite, a jog. I was so thrilled that the raven-prince had come back, and so excited to think that we were so close. Surely the fusang would be in front of me any minute.

We went up a steep slope, threading through thin-trunked trees. Once or twice a shriek from the top of my head warned me of a boulder as big as I was just before I would’ve run headlong into it. As we crested the rise it seemed that the snow, if anything, was falling harder than before. Certainly the wind was picking up, the breathy sigh turning into evil, punishing gusts, the laughter of an ice-demon. It blew hard into my face, forcing the breath back into my lungs, and I choked, coughing and stumbling. Another gust flung little jagged ice-flecks into my eyes, blinding me instantly. There was a terrible long blinking instant of realizing that I was about to fall, and then I fell forward, arms wheeling, crying out helplessly, headlong down the snowdrifted hill.

When I stopped sliding, I was grateful. The snow was so deep that I hadn’t gone far. I was shaking, though, and the side of my face stung from the friction of snow on skin.  
A throaty screech came from above me. “Get up, damn your worthless hide!” screeched the raven-prince. “You almost killed us both!”

I got up, trying my best to formulate some sort of retort, but my brain was so busy being happy that I hadn’t just broken both legs falling downhill in the worst blizzard I’d ever seen that it never coalesced. Prince Kanpei settled on my head again as I performed the perfectly futile ritual of brushing myself off. I took a deep breath. “All right, boss, where to?”

“Down and to the right. Not too sharp. And for heaven’s sake say something if you can’t see, next time. I nearly broke my neck.”

“You nearly broke _your_ neck.” I muttered, stepping carefully down into the next bit of drift. “Sheesh.”

Battling the wind, the snow, and the unpredictable drifts I picked my way down twenty feet, forty. Prince Kanpei settled himself in my hair, snarling his feet into an unshakable grip. As he did, I kept blinking as if I expected my vision to clear, as if I could blink away the blizzard if I just tried hard enough. I shook my head sharply and wiped a fresh rime of snowflakes from my eyelashes.

“You can’t see worth a damn, can you?” the raven asked.

I admitted I could not.

“I told you to tell me if you couldn’t see,” he groused, leaning his weight to the right. “Just follow my lead. You’ll be fine.”

Like a blinkered horse I looked straight ahead, not that there was anything for me to see in the depthless white, and leaned my path in the direction the prince did. With every step I had to remind myself to just trust him, to go where he steered me and not try to guide my own feet. I knew full well I couldn’t see anything further than my hand in front of my face, but my brain was not eager to accept it, or the validity of instructions conveyed via the medium of a bird shifting his weight from side to side on top of my head.  
I wouldn’t have thought that the weather could get much worse until it did. We dropped down out of a band of trees as we neared the floor of the valley, and were met—slammed, really—by a furious focused monster of a wind. I knew without being able to see the hills in question that it had been funneled down through a narrow, steep-walled valley that offered no way out but through. To keep my balance I leaned into the blast, and to keep his, so did Prince Kanpei, flapping his wings for all he was worth to keep from being blown off my head.

“Whatever you do, don’t stop!” he shrieked. I had no intention of doing so. Unless the storm knocked me flat, I would keep moving forward. The scouring wind bore a fine, sandy, stinging snow. I closed my eyes in self-defense. Totally dependent on the raven-prince to guide me, I lurched forward as best I could. Wings flapped desperately alongside my ears. I focused as hard as I could on the yanking on my hair. Somewhere in the howling of the storm I could hear Prince Kanpei swearing furiously. The words registered calmly in some cozy, untroubled study hall deep inside my brain, and dreamily I conjugated them. I bugger-a-dead-buzzard, you bugger-a-dead-buzzard. He, she, or it buggers-a-dead-buzzard…

Then, somehow, I was running. I knew it was real because of how fast my knees were going up and down. The weight of snow against my legs was gone, my feet moved freely for the first time in weeks, and I was running, joyous and free, in a white-on-white dream as if I were inside a pearl. I felt light as a smoke ring, as if I could rise into the air and let Prince Kanpei tow me up through the blizzard by my hair like some bizarre, fur-booted kite.

“You’re a slimy rotting toad corpse, holding out on me like that,” the prince yelled against the wind.

“Huh?”

“It might have been helpful if you had told me you were a qing gung master a little earlier in the proceedings, you gigantic ass. Would’ve saved us a lot of effort.”

“But I’m not! Ask Master Li! He pulled on my ears for three days!”

“Well, don’t look now, but you’re running on top of the snow,” Prince Kanpei informed me. “And it’s a little hard to tell what with this balmy springtime we’re having, but if you ask my opinion, you’re not leaving any footprints.”

I started to turn my head to look back over my shoulder and got a sharp peck between the eyebrows for my trouble. “Don’t jinx it, moron. I believe you. You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. Fine. Just keep running. I’ll steer.”

I blushed bright red, but I did as I was told.

Then, all at once, we were there. Snow lay on the ground, but none was falling. Instead it hung in the air, so that when I walked through it I left an Ox-shaped tunnel through the heavily-populated air. The wind no longer blew, and if the air was not precisely warm, it was not precisely cold either. A hundred or so feet away was a clearing completely free of snow, a ring of clear ground over which a tender bright velvet of grass grew, short and fuzzy. Ravens dotted the clearing, gossiping amongst themselves. In the center of it all stood a mulberry tree, generously expansive, its outward-reaching boughs filled with dozens of ravens and frilled with tiny new leaves of ravishing green.  
If I had expected that my entry into the fusang would be dignified, or that I would have even the smallest chance to present myself as a composed and humble petitioner, I was wrong. Yanking me by the hair and flapping as if he were forced to frog-march me there, Prince Kanpei steered me through the clearing to the very base of the tree, bringing me up, eye to eye, with the biggest raven I have ever seen. Lord Yangmu’s beak was easily as long as my thumb and as thick as both my thumbs together, and looked like it could snip through heavy iron chain without much effort. Each of his three legs almost as thick as my wrist, and the claws on the end of his twelve scaly toes were shiny and sharp as obsidian. His feathers glistened like wet oilskin and his eyes were huge and sharp and depthless and utterly terrifying.

“Hey, old fart,” Prince Kanpei said, hopping off my head and onto the branch beside his great-grandfather. “I brought you an ugly monkey.”

Lord Yangmu cocked his head as if to say that much was obvious.

“Oh grandfather Yangmu!” I began, reciting the formula the prince taught me. I trembled with the effort of resisting the instinct to kowtow. “You smell like a bucket of fish guts! Your mangy tail resembles a henpecked pullet’s! I’ve got something for you to look at, but you’re so stupid you might try to eat it instead!”

“Haaaaaawwww!” the great raven-god laughed. “Not bad, for an ugly monkey. Who taught you to speak Raven? Was it my worthless great-grandson?”

“Guilty as charged,” yawned the raven-prince, nibbling a wing-feather. “I do all kinds of things when I’m drunk and bored.”

“What do you want, then? You said you have something for me to look at.”

I nodded.

“Out with it, then, monkey-boy. I’ve got a Parliament to run and those goat-rapers down there on the grass are already conspiring to screw me out of tribute, you can tell just by looking at them. Can’t leave them alone for a minute. So let’s have it, whatever it is. My great-grandson likes to waste my time.”

I pulled the key out from under my jacket and coat, and managed to undo the clasp on the chain. With one powerful claw, Lord Yangmu took it from me and looked it over carefully.

“Well, I’m pleased to say that I can identify this for you,” Lord Yangmu announced. “It’s a key.”

The raven-prince laughed himself off his perch, and so did several of the nearby courtiers. I had to laugh too. “Well, you’re not nearly as old and blind as your great-grandson said you were, then!”

Lord Yangmu fluffed his feathers and made a chortling noise.

“He wants to know where the door is that has the lock that goes with the key,” the prince explained. “He’s far too stupid to find it himself.”

Yangmu looked at the key again, then scratched his head with one of his other feet. It is, I must confess, quite a sight to see a bird who can hold something in one claw, scratch himself with a second, and still stand solidly on his perch with a third.

“Hm. It looks familiar. I can think of a few places it might…” He swiveled his head and shouted to a raven who stood preening on an upper branch. “Hsu-Peng! Get down here, you fleabitten son-of-a-sparrow, I need to pick your tiny shriveled peanut of a brain.”

Several ravens chuckled as Hsu-Peng flew down. I watched intently as the two ravens examined the key, hefting it and tapping it, even licking it in various places. They bickered unintelligibly and at volume for several minutes before Lord Yangmu turned his gaze to me.

“As I thought,” Lord Yangmu said. “The door whose lock can be opened by this key is four miles east of Reed Flute Cave. Just fly south to Guanxi and ask anyone for directions. You can’t miss it.”

I blinked. Could it possibly be so easy? I had expected something… else. Something different. Ravens were so abrasive that I had expected more… difficulty. Hoops to jump through. Privileges that had to be earned. But maybe my ability to speak some Raven had taken care of that. Perhaps I’d caught him in a good mood. Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to take it for granted. I gave in, finally, to the urge to kowtow and, with my forehead firmly pressed against a root at the bottom of the tree, I praised Lord Yangmu and thanked him for his gracious assistance.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, you lummox, get up,” Lord Yangmu snapped. “No one in their right mind wants to see your gigantic buttocks unless it is absolutely unavoidable.”

I laughed out loud, and before I could stop myself, said “Oh, that’s funny. Master Li will love that.” I only said it under my breath, but ravens, as I had so inconveniently  
forgotten, have excellent hearing.

Lord Yangmu’s gaze froze me in place. “What did you say?”

I turned a shade of red normally associated with fine cinnabar. “I said that what you said about my buttocks was very funny, Lord.”

“I could have sworn I heard you say the name ‘Master Li.’ I trust that you are not going to try to tell me that I am so old that my ears must be full of moss and cobwebs?”

“No, Lord.” My palms were sticky with sweat.

“What a shame. You seem like such a nice, stupid young man. Don’t tell me you’re even stupider than I thought? Do you actually work for Li Kao?”

I gulped and nodded.

Lord Yangmu rocked from foot to foot to foot and rustled his wings. The background chatter of the other ravens went conspicuously silent. Time seemed to hang as still as the snowflakes that failed to fall around the edges of the clearing around the fusang.

“Come a little closer then, you great hulking idiot. I want to tell you something about your shameless hyena of an employer.”

I stepped as close as I could to the tree, wishing I dared say something in Li Kao’s defense, or at least in my own.

Lord Yangmu struck like lightning, his mighty head darting like a viper’s. His sharp, pointed beak crunched effortlessly through the curve at the top of my right ear. I was so stunned that all I could do was watch as he flipped his head backward, throwing the small wedge of ear-flesh up into the air and catching it, then swallowing it with gusto. Blood dripped down into my ear, down my neck, into the thick quilted padding of my jacket.

“Here,” Yangmu said, tossing the key back to me. “All right. We’ll call it even. When you see that bastard Li Kao again, tell him I say well played, he gets an extra point. Sending someone as naive, as rustic as you! And he would’ve gotten away with it if you weren’t quite so stupid. The great Li Kao employing the rustic simpletons of the world! Haaaaaw! Haaaaaaaw! Who would have thought!”

I caught the key and slipped it back around my neck, bowed and nodded and turned to leave. There was a growing wave of raven laughter at my back. I wasn’t sure whether I was embarrassed or not. Or perhaps I was proud. It was oddly, uncomfortably, hard to say.

“Hang on a second!” Lord Yangmu shouted. I turned back around, blood still trickling into my shirt. “Tell me, is there any of that hundred-year whiskey left anywhere? From the time your esteemed pig-sodomizing con man of an employer pretended to be Li Babai and bilked all those people out of the best in their cellars? Because if there is, I’m sending my worthless grandson to bring it all back here.”

Prince Kanpei squawked in dismayed surprise.

“One jar at a time,” Yangmu added. “And I will know if you skim any off the top, you lazy spoiled cuckoo’s egg. And you’d better get moving. Before I lose my temper.”

Prince Kanpei landed on the top of my head again, and we went back out into the snow, almost exactly the same way we came in.

§

“And so,” I explained to Master Li the next day, back in the cozy closeness of the herder’s hut, holding a poultice to my scabbed-over ear, “I fear there may not be many jars of whiskey left in the old granary if we ever do make it back to Dongfang.”

“Haaaaaaaaawww! Haaaaaaaaw!” laughed Master Li, sounding for all the world like Lord Yangmu. “Easy come, easy go. Ah well, Ox, you did your best. And if I’m not completely mistaken, that notch in your ear is in the precise spot that Old Master Rao used to use with his qing gung pupils. I hope so. It would come in handy. After all, there’s plenty of snow between here and Guanxi, and we’ve got a sleeping beauty to rescue.”

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: These are not my characters or my universe. Not even the historically accurate parts.


End file.
